LONDON - The British Army has become too used to fighting from sophisticated, well-resourced bases in places like Afghanistan and needs to rebuild capabilities more suitable to expeditionary warfare, according to the head of the Army.
"We have got far too used to a post-expeditionary psyche, where we have hard-wired bandwidth and quite sophisticated facilities in places like Camp Bastion," the main British military base in Afghanistan, said Gen. Sir Peter Wall, the chief of the General Staff.
"We need to transition our thinking to a more expeditionary psyche, where in the early days of a new campaign, we will be forced to operate without the sophistication we have managed to grow in the Afghan landscape," Wall said.
Speaking more broadly about the future development of land forces here, Wall said the British Army would have to transform itself from its Afghan-centric campaign to "something that gives us a more broad-based military capability with a regrowth of contingency.
"Like a number of other armies, we have over this period been forced to put some aspect of our war-fighting capability temporarily on hold as we got completely absorbed by the challenges of success in Afghanistan," he told an audience of senior military officers and industry executives at the Royal United Services Institute conference on land warfare here June 1.
The conflict in Libya is the latest reminder of the need for balanced capabilities. The Army, he said, needs to be able to deliver capabilities that will match the hybrid challenges of the future.
"Combined arms maneuvers remain a part of our repertoire, but it has to modernized and coupled with the ability to handle asymmetric threats and irregular threats and also take account of additional dimensions in battlespace, for example cyber," the British Army chief said.
British forces are well equipped to fight the Taliban, but the picture is more challenging when one looks at the equipment beyond that conflict, he said.
"The Army has an excellent suite of equipment at the moment, but it is specific to the Afghanistan challenge," Wall said. "If we look at our forward equipment program, it's rather a different story.
"We face a budget which is reducing considerably over the early years of the current decade, after which we will certainly require real-term growth over the latter part of the decade if we are to resource [our plans] for Future Force 2020," Wall said.
Future Force 2020 is the British government's plan to restructure the military over the next 10 years.
"We have got far too used to a post-expeditionary psyche, where we have hard-wired bandwidth and quite sophisticated facilities in places like Camp Bastion," the main British military base in Afghanistan, said Gen. Sir Peter Wall, the chief of the General Staff.
"We need to transition our thinking to a more expeditionary psyche, where in the early days of a new campaign, we will be forced to operate without the sophistication we have managed to grow in the Afghan landscape," Wall said.
Speaking more broadly about the future development of land forces here, Wall said the British Army would have to transform itself from its Afghan-centric campaign to "something that gives us a more broad-based military capability with a regrowth of contingency.
"Like a number of other armies, we have over this period been forced to put some aspect of our war-fighting capability temporarily on hold as we got completely absorbed by the challenges of success in Afghanistan," he told an audience of senior military officers and industry executives at the Royal United Services Institute conference on land warfare here June 1.
The conflict in Libya is the latest reminder of the need for balanced capabilities. The Army, he said, needs to be able to deliver capabilities that will match the hybrid challenges of the future.
"Combined arms maneuvers remain a part of our repertoire, but it has to modernized and coupled with the ability to handle asymmetric threats and irregular threats and also take account of additional dimensions in battlespace, for example cyber," the British Army chief said.
British forces are well equipped to fight the Taliban, but the picture is more challenging when one looks at the equipment beyond that conflict, he said.
"The Army has an excellent suite of equipment at the moment, but it is specific to the Afghanistan challenge," Wall said. "If we look at our forward equipment program, it's rather a different story.
"We face a budget which is reducing considerably over the early years of the current decade, after which we will certainly require real-term growth over the latter part of the decade if we are to resource [our plans] for Future Force 2020," Wall said.
Future Force 2020 is the British government's plan to restructure the military over the next 10 years.
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